***On Twitter @OfficialRVGA and on YouTube @ http://www.youtube.com/user/OfficialRVGA*** Welcome to the Retro Video Game Addict's Official blog page! Here you will be able to tap into the mind of a man who knows, loves, and enjoys his retro/classic video games. Everything from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo 64 is covered here, so strap yourself in for a fun ride down memory lane, and don't say that you weren't warned before hand. Please, enjoy your stay and keep your kids off my lawn.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

The Retro Video Game Addict reviews: Rygar for the NES!

You want to talk about
some bullshit? Okay, let's talk about some bullshit. Rygar for the
NES is bullshit and it isn't just because the game features jerky
graphics and poor gameplay, but mainly because the game gives you a
life bar worth 3 hits and no continues. Yeah, you read that
correctly. Rygar for the Nintendo Entertainment System gives the
player a 3 hit life bar but yet throws enemies and obstacals at you
faster than a cowboy on crack, it isn't even close to fair in that
they seem to take joy in watching the player struggle through the
levels as they try to progress through the game. The sick part of it
all is that there is a lot of backtracking to do and when you go back
to areas you've already visited all of the enemies and hurdles that
you've tackled come back to haunt you. Yep, it's one of those games,
pretty much all NES gamers know exactly what I'm talking about here.

You know something? I
like a good challenge. As long as the challenge is fair and the
player has a way to complete it without taking unavoidable damage or
without over the top tasks that require dumb luck to complete than
sign me up. But if you're going to load the screen with a million
enemies that re-spawn faster than steroid injected rabbits
reproducing than you can just kill it and take it back to formula
because I simply

will not tolerate it. It's sad too because Rygar
could be a fantastic game if modified just right, I mean, the game
has some fun aspects to it and offers some fun stages but it's over
the top challenge and frustrating gameplay keep it from being a top
challenger in the side scrolling action/adventure genre.

The game does has some
things going for it that don't totally suck, I suppose. Mainly the
musical score, which is okay at best, and if you can get past the
heroically annoying tune that strangely grows on you while you play
than you'll dig the tunes within the game. The control is pretty
tight too which is nice because, well, it's always nice to have a
quality control scheme while trucking through level after level of
horse crap. But almost instantly you'll soon notice that no matter
how good the control on Rygar is that you can't avoid some of the
bullshit traps and damage you'll take while progressing through the
levels. But yeah, all I can really say good about this game is that
the music doesn't totally suck and the control is surprisingly good.
Now back to the bullshit.

Rygar is one of those
games that I used to see at the video rental stores back in the day
when I actively rented games for my NES but yet I never took it upon
myself to rent this one. I did play it at a friends house momentarily
back in maybe 1991 or something but that wasn't enough time to fully
decipher whether or not I liked the game, but maybe there was an omen
there that barred me from ever asking for it for a birthday or
renting it from the store. Heck, even when Funcoland sold NES games
back in the day I'd see it for $3 or $4 and still always passed it up
in favor of something else. I guess my “Spidey Sense” was
tingling inside and warning me to steer clear of this game. Either
way, my experience as of late with this game has been less than
inviting and aside from having it as a part of my collection I doubt
I'll ever truly bother with it again. In fact, I'd rather know what
it feels like to get fucked by a rabid bear with a katana sword strap
on than play this game again. Well, on second thought maybe it isn't
quite bad enough to let a bear fuck me with a sword. But you get my
point.

So it's got tight
control and some pretty interesting music, but the said could be said
for the average NES game and I find this game to be much less than
average when compared to other similar NES games. With all of the
things this game got wrong I would place the 3 hit system coupled
alongside the no continues bullshit as the one thing that really keep
this game from being mediocre at best and place it in the “do not
play” pile. It's sad too, because with a few modifications this
game could have really been something special within the NES library,
but instead it takes it's rightful place in the annals for video game
shitfests. C'est La Vie.

6 comments:

LOL! I loved Rygar back in the day when it was a new game. Everything you say about is completely accurate, though. It WAS unfairly difficult, but man, beating it was ultimately very rewarding as a result. As a kid who was probably in the 8th grade at the time I had plenty of free time to keep playing it over and over again until I lucked through the whole thing. I suppose there were so many other games that were just as hard back then that it didn't feel like it was quite so out-of-bounds. It was as though it was created to eat up all of your tokens in the arcade. I had forgotten all of the back-tracking it required. That WAS painful. The musical score definitely was the best thing it had gong for it.

Glad you enjoyed the review! Yeah, the music was pretty cool but it kind of got on my last nerve about an hour into the game, it just kinda loops over and over and is cheesily heroic. Hehe, not a bad score though overall.